Hello everyone, I am very new to computer graphics meaning that I know hardly anything except for because interfaces and concepts from some limited research. My problem is that I am not familiar with programming, coding, developing, or computer graphics but have developed a high interest in it recently.

What sparked my interest was a game that I play called League of Legends and I have been looking everywhere I can to find information about modding character skins from the game. This is done frequently and available for download but I would like to do it personally for myself and my desires.

I have no idea where to start however, but have downloaded softimage xsi mod tool which I believe is a fairly old program. I do not have a lot of money to spend and that is why I went this route. Do any of you veterans have some advice on what it is I need to be looking at in order to import a skin file into a graphics program, mod the color, particles, and animations, then export it back into a program which places it in my game???

Thank you for any help

P.S. I hope this complies with the forum rules. Due to my lack of knowledge and vocabulary in the realm of graphic design I do not know any other way to ask this question or go about searching for my answer.

Your post and where it's posted are perfectly fine, don't worry, no rules broken, but you might not get a lot of bites on this.

Generally I/O (input/output) is determined by whatever the engine/platform supports, and you're shooting for one probably most people haven't worked with.

Look for what file formats it supports, collada, fbx, dotxsi, obj and so on, and see what level of re-assembly is required in their toolkit.
Some will take an fbx including deformations, animation, geometry, UVs, UV to texture coupling and all, some will require you individually deal with all the bits and re-assemble them in the toolkit.

That's the generic, DCC app (Digital Content Creation Application) side of things you can get from here, the specific of the platform you have elected to work with though you are probably better off asking about and digging into through some mod community forum or similar that is more related to that particular game and mod scene than here.

Thank you for your response and I have figured out a way to obtain Maya 2014 due to my current student status. I will begin digging around on that forum and platform considering the files that I will be importing are .skl and based on the research I have done those are from the Maya program and seem to be exclusive to Maya. I have seen some people use Photoshop as well for the recoloring and painting and then saving and importing into Maya for the rendering and animations before sending back into the game. I will begin looking around in those two things so if anyone has advice on those I will appreciate it.

SKL files are a skeleton/hierarchy/motion output for Maya. They don't deal with geometry, UVs or textures though, so for reskinning, unless the toolset in this game is truly retarded and requires one even to reskin a character, it shouldn't make much of a difference.

If you have student status, you should be able to access pretty much any software for a reduced price btw.

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